Sumo!

Sumo! is a simple game that involves two sumo wrestlers vying for control of a bridge spanning a river. The wrestlers start at either end of the bridge, and their goal is to advance as far as possible while pushing their opponent backwards. You and your opponent move by playing numbered tiles out of your hand in alternating fashion until the tiles run out, or one wrestler is forced off the edge of the bridge. These simple mechanics conceal a deeper level of strategy, and the skilled AI opponents will make you want to improve your play. However, after a handful of games, the game’s puzzling array of bugs and idiosyncrasies will leave you hoping that the developer has more substantial fixes in the works.

You play Sumo! with a deck of 30 tiles, containing six groups of five tiles marked with each number from 0 to 5. Each tile represents the number of planks that you can move forward or backwards on the bridge. The tiles are also used in attack and defense. You launch an attack by playing one or more tiles of the number that would move you onto the plank occupied by your opponent. Your opponent can then play an equal number of the same tile to block the attack. For example, if your sumo is three spaces away from your opponent, you can play any number of tiles marked ‘3’ to attack. If the opponent can play the same number of 3’s, he blocks the attack, the the tiles are discarded, and both players stay in their original position. If not, your attack is successful, and you throw your opponent head-over-heels towards their starting position.

Each player maintains a 5-tile hand that replenishes after you move or attack. You cannot play a tile that would move you past your opponent, so the game’s strategy comes from jockeying for position to maintain a distance that favors your tiles. If you are close to your opponent and cannot play a legal forward move or a ‘0’ tile, you must move backwards, giving up valuable space and potentially opening yourself up for attack. A round ends when a wrestler is thrown backwards past their starting point, or when the deck of tiles runs out. Points are awarded for launching a successful attack, for throwing your opponent off the bridge, or for being the most advanced wrestler when the tiles run out.

Sumo’s design is very appropriate for short play sessions on the iPhone. Games can usually be completed in about 5 minutes, and all the game’s touch buttons are conveniently located near your thumb. In addition, the visuals are nice and clean, and the corpulent combatants have an undeniable charm. In other words, the stage is set for a fun little package…up until the game actually starts moving. The timing of the game events and animation have the feel of rushed coding, or a sloppy port from another platform. Your player has at least rudimentary animation while walking forward, but your opponent has no animation at all, giving him an ethereal, sliding locomotion unbefitting for a 400 pound wrestler. The animation is not a necessity for the core gameplay, so the existing two or three-frame animations would have been sufficient, had they been consistently applied.

Furthermore, the notification messages that pop up to award you points do not tightly correspond to the action on screen, so you might get a flood of them popping up haphazardly after playing a tile. These are appropriately verbose for the first few play-throughs, but they become an unnecessary distraction once you get a feel for the scoring. The sound feels a bit tacked on as well. The game has only a few low-fidelity sound effects, and lack background music entirely. It adds nothing to the experience.

Other bugs go beyond presentation, altering the gameplay for the worse. For instance, the rather important in-game manual disappeared for a number of days during our review period, before magically returning. Also, that same manual specifies that only one tile can be played to move, which is simply not true; you can play as many same-numbered tiles as you want to execute a move, and it often benefits you to do so. The most egregious bug occurs after the computer lands a successful attack. Rather than waiting for your turn, the AI player waits a moment and then simply plays another tile, barreling towards you to finish the job. If you are quick enough to play a tile, the AI will still play this second tile simultaneously, which will occasionally cause the wrestlers to pass each other, breaking the game.

We simply can’t recommend Sumo! in its present form, as much as we’d like to. If it were free, we would suggest that you give it a try, since it’s a fun little game and the bugs don’t obstruct basic play. However, paid games must pass a certain QA and polish threshold that Sumo! hasn’t yet reached. We hope to post a more favorable update in the near future, once the developer squashes some of the game’s outstanding bugs and other issues.

Connect with us

Latest Recommended Games

The fine folks at Milkbag games have released Sidewords. A fun little diversion of a word game that is the devil child of crosswords and scrabble. For each level in the game the grid must be completed to win the level — this means that each letter at the top and side must be used. And not just the top or side, but each word must be made up of letters from the top and side to create a grid. It’s a pain, but in the right kind of way. Even the simplest of the levels can be a head scratcher until you get used to the game. Well worth the $3 as a diversion while we wait for Milkbag to finally release Snow Siege.

We’d like to thank our sponsor for this week, Zap Zap Kindergarten Math.

It’s not always easy to tear your kids away from their tablets and make them do something edifying. Thankfully, Zap Zap Kindergarten Math relieves you of this task by turning mathematics into a fun touchscreen video game. Win win!

Aimed at children 3-6 years old, the app makes math fun by ‘gamifying’ it, turning simple mathematics problems into little challenges so that your pre-schooler can learn and play at the same time.

There are more than two dozen mini-games, split across three categories: Numbers, Shapes and Measurements, and Add and Subtract. According to the developer the difficulty of these puzzles is adaptive too, so kids of any ability can be both encouraged and challenged.

Mini Dayz has launched and it’s a pixelated 2.5D open world that’s as brutal as the desktop version. In this game, the player is dumped on shore with nothing. They must scavenge around for food, water, and weapons while avoiding attack. It’s the kind of game where the goal is to stay alive as long as possible. But that will never be very long. It’s oddly free and seems to only have an ad on the main screen — for now.

Pewter Games has brought their charming point and click adventure The Little Acre to iOS. It’s an amazingly beautiful animated adventure set in a sort of hybrid magical / alien world. A great all ages adventure and very fun.

We’d like to thank our sponsor for this week, The House of Da Vinci by Blue Brain Games. There’s a reason Leonardo Da Vinci is the only renaissance figure who routinely shows up in video games you know. With his remarkable inventiveness and genius for creative problem-solving, Da Vinci was a gamer through and through. He was just born 500 hundred years too soon. Thankfully, there are studios like Blue Brain Games to bring him to life in videogame form. The House of Da Vinci, which comes to us courtesy of a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign, is a puzzler that seeks to channel the artistry and innovation of its title character.

You play as one of Da Vinci’s more promising apprentices, and you have the challenging task of trying to work out where the hell he’s gone. Was he assassinated by the church? Who knows. Has he quietly gone into a retirement? Perhaps. Did he accidentally invent a shrink ray and shrink himself down to the size of an dustmite? Probably not. Da Vinci’s workshop looks beautiful, thanks to some impressive 3D graphics, and the in-game environment is crammed with all the elaborate machines and crazy inventions you’d expect to find in the workplace of a renaissance genius.(more…)

Poly Bridge is out now on iOS, and it’s good to have it! It’s a great game and many seem to agree that it’s the best bridge builder game available. But the iOS versions, so far, is missing the sandbox mode. I would hope that it’s coming soon in an update. If you are all interested in physics puzzlers, grab this one. (Note: the video is for the PC version, I have yet to see a trailer for the mobile version, the developer Dry Cactus isn’t that great at marketing…)

Advertisement

Apple, the Apple logo, Apple Watch, iPad, iPhone, and Apple TV are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. App Store is a service mark of Apple Inc. Other terms may be trademarks of their respective companies.